Routine Maintenance for Your Glock

Think of your gun similarly in the way you think of your car. You’re periodically keeping up with maintenance: getting oil changes, tire rotations, replacing brakes and other parts. Your gun requires the same kind of attention throughout its lifetime. Every 4000 miles or so you may need an oil change, just like every few hundred to a thousand rounds you may need to clean and replace worn parts. In this post, we’re going to lay out the basic formula for maintaining your glock so that it won’t fail you when you really need it.

1. Keep track of your round count

Going back to the car analogy, it’s good to be aware of your mileage for when to get routine check ups and for when you typically replace certain parts. Same with your glock. If you haven’t already, start tracking your round count for all your weapons, as well as the round count for each individual component within. This knowledge allows you to maintain your glock appropriately and regularly.

Keep a journal, a simple excel sheet, or better yet use an smartphone app to track your rounds. No need to get hung up or be extremely meticulous here. But if you’re a regular shooter, it’s better to say “I know” than “I think.”

How often you clean your gun is up to you. According to Bruce Eimer, an NRA Certified Firearms Instructor, you should be cleaning your gun every 2-3 times you hit the gun range or every 400 rounds. If you carry often, but do not shoot as much, you should still run in through a good cleaning every 3 months. “Once a year, you also might want to consider taking your Glock to a Certified Glock Armorer or qualified gunsmith (who works on Glocks regularly) to have it detail stripped and detail cleaned.”

If you own more than one gun, read through the user manual for instructors on cleaning, disassembly and reassembly, and lubrication. Follow this step by step guide on how to clean your gun.

Lubrication. It is important to use a good quality oil. Glocks are made to be sturdy, smooth machines, so they do not need to be lubricated often. There is a possibility of over lubrication. Caleb Lee of PreparedGunOwners.com, suggests just a “few touch up drops every 500-2,000 rounds.” The main components to lubricate are the connector, slide, and the barrel. The magazine, the weep hole, and the firing pin SHOULD NOT receive any lubrication.

3. Replace any worn parts

The springs are likely what you’ll need to replace over time. Caleb Lee gives us breakdown of the approximate rounds for when you can start to replace your parts:

Ideally you want to be ahead of the game and replace your Glock parts before they start to break or ware. The parts that tend to wear the fastest are the recoil spring assembly, the trigger spring, the slide lock spring, and the magazine catch spring. Luckily, we bundle these products for you. Take a look at our packaged parts here.